Tour Blog

With nothing on the agenda, I decided that I was going to devote today to practise. I did a few picking exercises in the morning and, once I’d got into the flow of things, I decided to watch some videos on the internet whilst I practised.

The first thing I decided to watch was a documentary called ‘Bloodline’. I’d heard a bit about it, seen a trailer for it and was generally interested by the controversy it seemed to have caused. For those who don’t know, Bloodline is a documentary following an investigation into the claim that, after his crucifixion and resurrection, Jesus married Mary Magdalene and moved to France (where he presumable retired and lived out the rest of his days eating and drinking the finest French food and wine (now, this is one conspiracy theory I could readily accept – after all, we’re called to follow his example!)).

The documentary was, if nothing else, entertaining. The whole film was punctuated by death threats, phone tapping, accounts of mysterious murders and numerous other acts of espionage, all supposedly carried out by the Catholic church in order to keep this dreadful secret safe. Then, in my humble opinion, the documentary got a little more fanciful when an English bloke who lived in a camper van in France found a treasure map from clues in a church. The treasure map led him to a buried bottle with another clue / map in it, which in turn led to several more bottles / clues / maps until eventually the final clue led to a box that contained some ancient artefacts; supposedly belonging to Mary Magdalene or, her husband, Jesus. The same guy had also found an ancient burial chamber that contained a mummified body with a Knight’s Templar shroud over it, along with numerous other artifacts – this body was supposedly Mary Magdalene’s. All in all, this was an entertaining couple of hours, but to be expected to believe this as a factual documentary was pushing it a bit (although I’m sure some people believed that ‘Blair Witch’ was an actual documentary).

Whilst watching the documentary, my t-shirt arrived – I now have something to wear on stage :o)

At 4pm, Collin and Jessica (who were busy working at their own stuff – Collin preparing things for the tour and Jessica doing work for their school) asked me if I wanted to come with them to the local market for some fruit and veg. How could I turn down the prospect of cycling to a Dutch market – the complete Holland experience (minus a windmill) in one single trip? On the way there we encountered several bike-traffic-jams; a sight not often seen anywhere else in the world. Collin makes the most amazing juices, so we bought a load of fruit and veg for him to turn into juice and then returned home.

I spent the rest of the day practising and working on alternate picking whilst watching various other similar themed, but a little more factual, documentaries – one on the Knights Templar and another 2 on Freemasonry; a day full of conspiracy!

Whilst engrossed in my picking / conspiracies, Collin made a VERY lemony juice. It tasted great, but soon the acid from the lemon was causing me to cramp up. I spent the next few hours drinking lots of water to try to flush the acid out of my system. Collin later went to the studio to work on his drum parts and interesting, he said that he’d cramped up really quickly whilst he was there – so it’s not just me that has this reaction to citric acid.